Abdel Majid Mlegta is the man who single handedly turned the siege of Tripoli by the rebel forces from a stalemate into a quick, over night victory. Operation Dawn Mermaid, a joint operation of rebel forces on the ground and NATO bombing squads, rushed Tripoli in a couple of days. Mlegta, a businessman running a catering company that served the Interior Ministry, acted as a go between dissenting Gaddafi officials and NATO. Dissatisfied by Gaddafi’s ruthless supression of the rebellion, some military and interior ministry officials decided to betray their master. They gave Mlegta precious information about key locations and people in Tripoli, which were then targetted by the rebels and by NATO.
In addition, extensive help was given to the rebels by NATO special operations forces. Dozens of Libyans were trained by the French and the British to be sent behind Libyan lines.
The complete story is told by Reuters
Special report: The secret plan to take Tripoli | Reuters
Gaddafi military intelligence and security officers [gave Mlegta jumpdrives that] contained information about seven key operations rooms in the capital, including internal security, the Gaddafi revolutionary committees, the popular guards — as Gaddafi’s voluntary armed militia was known — and military intelligence. The data included names of the commanders of those units, how many people worked in each center and how they worked, as well as crucial details like the number plates of their cars, and how each unit communicated with the central command led by intelligence chief Abdullah al-Senussi and Gaddafi’s second son Saif al-Islam. That memory card — which Mlegta later handed to officials at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) — provided the basis of a sophisticated plan to topple the Libyan dictator and seize Tripoli. The operation, which took months of planning, involved secretly arming rebel units inside the capital. Those units would help NATO destroy strategic targets in the city — operation rooms, safe houses, military barracks, police stations, armored cars, radars and telephone centers. At an agreed time, the units would then rise up as rebels attacked from all sides.